Staff Picks

There is an inherent duality in Emily Carr’s artistic project of recording and commemorating Northwest Coast Native villages and totem poles. Her images fell within a racist paradigm that grounded a modern Canadian national art in the assimilation of the style and motifs of aboriginal art. They were seen as a complement to the Group of Seven’s “wilderness” images, which erased the living aboriginal presence from the landscape. On the other hand, Carr’s writings and paintings show her strong and persistent sympathy and admiration for Native peoples and their culture, and her attempts to counteract the negative racial stereotypes and to criticize the injustices of her day. The article focuses on Carr’s confrontations of Native cultural change, for example in her images of Skidegate and Haida Gwaii, and argues that her work has continuing relevance as a statement of respect for First Nations’ traditions and endurance

This paper explores the relationships between landscape and power, colonialism and its aftermaths, and state territoriality and its contestation, in the work of two popular Northwest Coast landscape painters: Emily Carr and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. The work of both artists is explored in terms of their representation of relations between indigenous peoples, physical landscapes, state power, and modernity, and in the context of ongoing political struggles over land, resources and the environment between First Nations and the Canadian government. The paper also calls attention to the multiple and fractured nature of postcolonial visualities, to the discursive, social, technological and institutional relations that shape how landscapes are experienced and represented, and, ultimately, to the trace of colonial pasts in the environmental and political imaginaries of a postcolonial present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The catalogue From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia was published to accompany the exhibition of the same name organized conjointly by the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and co-curated by the Toronto art critic Sarah Milroy and Dulwich’s director Ian Dejardin. It includes more than one hundred colour reproductions of Carr’s work, which it brings in dialogue with about the same number of images of historic Native art of the Northwest Coast. The volume focuses on the years after Carr’s participation in the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern (1927) and presents her as an artist channelling the influence of her homeland and its Native peoples

Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr evolves out of Gerta Moray's doctoral dissertation, "Northwest Coast Native Culture and the Early Indian Paintings of Emily Carr, 1899-1913" (University of Toronto, 1993). Marcia Crosby, a writer and historian of Tsimshian and Haida ancestry--as well as the grand-daughter of Clara and William Russ, whose portraits Carr painted in 1928--wrote the foreword. The Russes were, as Crosby notes, Cart's "guides in 1912 to some of the Haida villages, the people she fictively named 'Jimmie and Louise,' each story titled by the names of places where they'd taken her to paint: 'Tampp,' 'Skedans,' and 'Cumshewa'" (vi). They were also her hosts sixteen years later when she returned on a second northern expedition to paint in Haida Gwaii (vi). Carr wrote to Marius Barbeau in 1928 about her intended trip, "I want to get back, even if the poles are all gone I want to get the feel of the places again" (291).

The article reviews the book "Unsettling Encounters: First Nations Imagery in the Art of Emily Carr," by Gerta Moray

The article examines the cultural appropriations and identificatory practices that underlie in woman author Emily Carr's "Indian Stories." These practices are markers of Carr identification with First Nations peoples, whose representations Carr both crafted and internalized by the practice of colonizing appropriation. The article concerns the intricacies of Carr's writing and her treatment of First Nations peoples of the northwest coast. These writings not only reveal a fictive portrait of the northwest coast and its aboriginal inhabitants but also serve as the textual traces of Carr's struggles both to understand her own creativity and to forge a place in the world as a female artist. Identification with First Nations peoples enabled Carr to generate an artistic identity through appropriative acts. The most obvious psychological inference that can be made from Carr's seeming willingness, perhaps even eagerness, to change names is that it is a symbolic refusal of the names she had been given by her parents and of the restrictions of Victorian sensibilities and familial responsibilities that names carried with them.

Discusses British Columbian writer Emily Carr's belief in the myth of the vanishing Indian. Ways in which Carr's own writings suggest a more complicated portrait of both Carr and Aboriginal peoples; Decline in the Aboriginal population of British Columbia; Carr's authorship of 'Klee Wyck,' which recorded her experience with British Columbia's Aboriginal peoples.

This is an article which features the Canadian painter Emily Carr. She describes her personal meaning of what Canadian art is and why it is so inspirational to herself as an artist. Also she explains the ways by which she regards her subject matter while she is creating and what her beliefs are in pertainment to her images.

The article focuses on Chinese immigrants and the problem of national identity in the work of artist Emily Carr. Carr's approach to the Chinese at times bears similarities to her assumptions about First Nations persons, although, at other times, it is contrary to these assumptions: the manner, for example, in which she foregrounded and enfolded First Nations cultural forms into her own work is similar to her ostensibly benign assessment of Chinese art, artists, and religious figures, but her indignation at the manner in which First Nations persons are treated by the government never extends to the Chinese.

Shortly before her death in the spring of 1945, Emily Carr told her confidant, Ira Dilworth, that the next generation would probably "scoff" at her honours and consider her "trash." It did not happen quite like this. Carr's contemporaries were successful in keeping her name and her reputation before the Canadian public, apparently defying the wheel of fashion.

Emily Carr (1871–1945) is today generally considered one of Canada’s greatest and most unique artists. However, her recognition was a long time coming, and it was only towards the end of her life that fame came her way. The article discusses the critical reception of Carr’s work both as a painter and writer, paying particular attention to her border-crossing strategies in her use of indigenous/First Nations art and culture in her own work. Furthermore, it looks at the development of Carr’s art and its connection to the construction of a Canadian national identity, or Canadian-ness, in the early twentieth century.

The title "Interventions On The Imaginary" is a clear reference to Marcia Crosby’s essay, "The Construction of the Imaginary Indian", and situates itself within the realm of remix culture—as digital interventions onto works that contain the colonial gaze.
These interventions participate in the growing discourse of decolonization, acting as “tags” to challenging the colonial fantasy of terra nullius and confronting the dominant colonial culture’s continued portrayal of Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race.

An article discussing postmodern and postcolonial critiques of Emily Carr's depictions of Indigenous culture.